It is now common practice in a variety of situations to use portable medical devices, such as ultrasound devices, for examination of patients at the location of the patient. Often this location is the patient's bed in a hospital room. The portable device can be brought to the patient for the examination and in such a situation, the portable device operates from batteries internal to the device. The portable device, in one embodiment, resides on a movable cart and plugs into the cart for recharging. The cart, in turn, plugs into a premises power supply and operates to supply a source of power for both operating the portable device while the device is attached to the cart and for recharging the device's internal batteries. The cart also provides a source of power for peripheral equipment, such as printers, displays, etc. used with the medical device. Thus the cart requires a power cord long enough to plug into the premises source of power which is a wall outlet.
Several problems exist when the cart is moved to a patient's bedside. Some of these problems revolve around the fact that often there is a myriad of equipment plugged into the wall outlets in a patient's room and available outlets are scarce. Even when outlets are available, they typically are a large distance from where the cart is to be used thereby necessitating a long power cord attached to the cart. In addition to the problem of simply running this cord from the cart to the wall outlet, there is the problem of containing the cord when the cart is being moved from location to location. Long power cords, as anyone who has used an electric vacuum sweeper well knows, have a disconcerting affinity for becoming tangled, caught on furniture and getting underfoot. In general, power cords on devices, particularly long power cords used in cramped conditions, are a general nuisance and worse, often unsafe.
In the medical setting discussed above, when the carts are not in actual use with a patient they are moved off to the side and often the operator forgets to plug in the cart. However, even if the operator remembers to plug in the cart, there is not always an available power outlet in close proximity to the present location of the cart. Thus, the cart operator then must hunt down a suitable location to “park” the cart. Often this suitable location is based on physical space and not on power availability. This then results in the failure to recharge the portable medical equipment residing on the cart.
Another problem is that the carts tend to be left available area randomly (usually in a location near where they were last used, with or without being plugged into a power outlet) and thus when the next user desires the use of the cart a search is often required to locate an available cart. This then wastes valuable time of doctors and practitioners either while they look for the cart or while a procedure they wish to be perform is delayed while someone else hunts down the cart.